The Month In BlackBerry Apps: Slacker Stitchers Make Robot Schedules

Hey look, it's our first BlackBerry app roundup. We've got free podcasts, free music and free hacks to make your BlackBerry more usable—or let you grind its battery into the ground.

Stitcher: Formerly an iPhone/iPod touch app, Stitcher lets you cut together podcasts to stream them to your phone as virtual radio stations. Mostly news(ish) content, but it spans from the Wall Street Journal to Slate and we'll take free streaming audio wherever we can get it. Free at App World or OTA for Curve, Bold and Storm. (Image via Crackberry)

LEDReset: Simple, but great: Turns off your BlackBerry's LED light until the next alert. Grab it here OTA. Free.

ScoreMobile BlackBerry: Real-time sports scores for MLB, NHL, NBA, and PGA from Canadia's theScore—so perhaps their Canadian numbers aren't to be trusted. Supposedly, more sports are coming this summer. I'm hoping for PBA scores, personally, since it's been way too long since I've bowled. Free at App World or OTA.

Slacker 2.0: With the latest version of Slacker Radio, song transitions and skip times are supposed to be damn near instant. All of the regular features are still there, obviously, with full stereo over any connection and offline caching being two of its biggest perks. Free in App World.

SmrtGuard for BlackBerry: What makes SmrtGuard worth a look is that it rolls up a bunch of security features for the always-losing-their-damn-phone crowd into one tasty combo: Location tracking, remote data wipe and remote backup and restore. Oh, and stealth listening, so you can hear whoever picked up your phone gloating. I'm sorta surprised RIM doesn't actually bake all of this into the OS, but SmrtGuard delivers it for $4 a month or $US45 for the year.

ForceRadioOn: Do you hate it when your BlackBerry kills the phone because the battery is moments away from death? ForceRadioOn speeds your phone to its doom by turning the cellular radio on against its will, so you can gab for a few fleeting seconds. Free here and other app stores.

BB: Robot Scheduler: The range of this robot schedule slave is pretty impressive. You can schedule emails, texts, audio recordings, GPS location sharing, or pretty much anything else you can do on BlackBerry, in simple or more complex arrangements. It's only available for the Bold and Storm at the moment. $US6 OTA here.

This list is in no way definitive (especially cause it's our first!). If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this month, give us a heads up or let us know in the comments. Have a good rest of your weekend everybody!